Angry Birds Transformers (mobile game)

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Angry Birds Transformers
Angry Birds Transformers

It's happening.
Developer Rovio
Publisher Rovio Mobile
Platforms Apple iOS 7+ (iPad, iPhone)
Android
Release date October 15, 2014 (iOS)
October 30, 2014 (Android)

Angry Birds Transformers is a mobile app for both iPhone and Android platforms developed and published by Rovio. It is a themed version of the developer's mega-popular mobile game Angry Birds.


Synopsis

The Allspark Egg has landed on Piggy Island, transforming its dueling inhabitants and giving them bodies and powers based on the Transformers: the birds of the Flock become Autobirds and the Bad Piggies the Deceptihogs. The two sides briefly continue their struggle with these new powers until they are both threatened by another transformed group, the Eggbots, who seek to transform all of Piggy Island into metal, backed by countless robotized Minion Pigs.

Most of the Autobirds and all of the Deceptihogs are captured leaving only Red (who has the powers of Optimus Prime) and Chuck (with the powers of Bumblebee) free. The two head out to free the Autobirds and Deceptihogs, because only by joining forces can they restore Piggy Island to normal!

Gameplay

The game is a deviation from the normal Angry Birds formula, but the core goal, toppling block towers to pop the Bad Piggies on them, is the same.

Once you select an available stage from the map of Piggie Island, your chosen character runs along the foreground at a set speed, as block towers scroll by in the background. By tapping the screen, your character takes aim and fires their weapon. The trick is to quickly determine which blocks in the structure are best to destroy/shove to cause a domino effect, toppling them and popping the Piggies by dropping blocks on them or making them fall far enough. (Remember, weaker blocks are not always the best target!)

Block types include:

  • Glass (or Ice, according to other sources) Blocks: Very weak, easily shattered
  • Wood Blocks: Fairly sturdy but not hard to break
  • Stone Blocks: Very durable, better for pushing than breaking
  • TNT Blocks: Easily-broken red crates that explode with a considerable radius, sending blocks flying
  • Coin Blocks: Golden blocks that spit out Coins with every hit. Pretty dang sturdy, but if you destroy them, you earned a lot of Coins.

Most areas also have random destructible elements that can be blasted. The more destruction you cause, the more Coins you get to buy upgrades and explore new areas. Each level has a set length; you do not have to pop every Piggie to pass, merely survive to the end.

"Survive"? Yeah. Some Piggies are weaponized and will begin to attack shortly after appearing on-screen, even before you can retaliate. Thus, popping these Piggies (or at least upending them to throw off their aim) quickly becomes essential. You can also try to escape attacks and falling giant stone statues by transforming to vehicle mode. This speeds you along a bit, but removes your ability to attack, plus you can only maintain vehicle mode for a limited time. Attacking automatically transforms you back to robot mode. There are other obstacles that can decrease a character's health bar; lose all your life and the character is taken out of the game for a time, but they will eventually return. While you will not earn Piggie points for the level, you do keep any Coins you collected. Health does not restore between levels, so if a character is low you must spend Coins to repair them, which also takes them out of the game for a while, but not as long as defeat does. This time-out is in real-time, even when the game is off, but you can spend earned Gems or scan a figure with a Telepod to make the repairs instantaneous. It is now possible to repair all characters at once in the Barracks through spending either Coins or Gems.

Cleared stages will slowly earn Coins over real-time. Tapping on the Coins on the map adds them to your bank. After a set point they will not accrue anymore. This threshold is about four hours of real time, yielding 560 Coins per freed area. There are also randomly spawning treasure chests on the map, tap them to earn various amounts of Gems. However, roaming Eggbots will re-cyberform cleared stages, which removes their Coin bonuses. You can see which stages they are working on, how long the cyberforming process will take, and even speed up their work (at the cost of Gems). This too goes on in real-time. Once a stage is re-cyberformed, it can be played again. A good idea is to tap to see who's up at bat next. Note that merely peeking to see which character is next will not automatically charge you Gems, you still have a choice to intercept now or not.

If you don't want to complete a stage due to it being extremely hard or frustrating, players can use the Skywarp Airfield to have Skywarp Pig attack and remove the stage while still rewarding them with Coins and popped pigs. You can only do this three times, and it costs Gems (3 the first time, 7 the second time, and 15 the third time).

In addition to the stages, there are now Space Bridge missions that your freed characters can complete in order to earn Materials, Coins, Gems, popped pigs, or even new characters (Arcee, Airachnid, Prowl, and Bluestreak). There are three difficulty Space Bridges - Easy, Medium, and Hard. Missions are played by selecting one to three characters (for more than one character per mission, you have to spend Gems), that match up with the mission's category. The types of missions have either a light bulb icon (intelligence), a magnifying glass icon (investigation), or a missile icon (firepower) which helps the player determine which character would be most suited for completing the mission. The higher the level your character is at, the more chances it has of getting a better score. Characters who are taking part in missions are unable to be played in the stages until the mission timer runs out. When selecting a mission, you are able to use popped pigs as "pig reinforcements" to lower the mission timer. When the mission is completed, the result screen shows how many keys have been unlocked, which help unlock prizes. The more characters assigned to the mission, the more keys you unlock (you also have the option to watch an ad to earn one additional key). The way prizes are earned is that the five items are placed in presents which spin around the screen, forcing the player to randomly select a present and hope for the best. If you don't have enough keys to unlock the remaining prizes, you can spend Gems to collect the remaining presents (10 for Easy, 20 for Medium, and 30 for Hard).

Materials earned in missions or acquired through stages are stored in the Silo. The Silo can be upgraded using Coins and Materials in order to store larger numbers of Materials and increase the chances of Materials being dropped in the stages. The Silo's maximum level is 15. Materials are also used to help upgrade a Transformer. Players can earn a free Material if they watch an ad.

Material types include:

  • Birdium (Autobird)
  • Autocog (Autobird)
  • Anger Chip (Autobird)
  • Pig Iron (Deceptihog)
  • Deceptigear (Deceptihog)
  • Badness Processor (Deceptihog)
  • Super Rareium

Character choices

Every stage has a pre-set character you control, based on who you've rescued so far. Every character has a different style of attack, movement speed, and armor rating, as well as an unlockable ability (which must be fueled first by blasting a cyberformed piece of scenery to return it to normal, which is not always as easy as it sounds). Working out the strengths and weaknesses of each character is key to high scores, and in some cases simple survival. (See each characters' individual page for a breakdown of their abilities.) Note that there are only three abilities in the game, though, and each character has only one. A shield (which is sponsored by StateFarm on the phone version but not the tablet version), a short range electromagnetic pulse that can stun pigs or bring down missiles and mortar towers, and an energon airstrike, or technically a carpet bombing run performed by Skywarp. Each ability can be upgraded through the character upgrades at different levels, and get stronger for each tier, but you must destroy a corresponding number of cyberformed terrain. 3 cyberformed bits means 3 cubes means a fully charged ability, but it can also be used with only one cube.

That was before one of the most recent updates. Characters no longer have preset abilities; instead they have "Energonicons", miniature drones used for a specific function. Airstrike, EMP, and Shield abilities are still in the game, but they are now the "Strikebot", "Electroblast", and "Shieldor" respectively. There are also Energonicons that can create earthquakes, leech off of an enemy's health for you, reflect enemy attacks, and more. There are forty in all, with stars ranging from one to four in accordance with its rarity. They can be crafted in Professor Pig's lab using materials you have earned throughout the game; said materials can be used to craft coins, more materials, or even gems.

New characters can be added to your roster in two different ways. In-game, each character is held captive in a block of ice, and you must "spend" a specific number of popped Piggies to break them out. You then have to play a short level with that character, and if they make it to the end, they're yours to keep. If not, they are re-frozen, but thankfully you can try again without having to spend all those hard-earned Piggy points again. The characters Arcee, Airachnid, Prowl, and Bluestreak are earned through missions.

Out-of-game, this is where you spend actual-factual money, on the tie-in toys. By placing one of the figures on a Telepod and placing that on your device's camera lens, the game reads the code on the figure and inserts it into the game for a limited amount of time (roughly 6 hours). Some variant characters can only be obtained via Telepod. While the characters unlocked this way are only available temporarily until unlocked via Piggie points, there is no limit on how often you can scan the figure, plus any upgrade progress is saved. You can also use this method to power-up already-unlocked characters before a stage or speed up their repairs without spending Gems; again there is no limit to the number of times you can scan (but the effects will not stack).

Every character can be upgraded multiple times (maximum level for characters is 15) by spending Coins, and now Materials, which (of course) takes them out of play for a while. Each upgrade is pre-set, increasing attack strength, armor strength, or vehicle mode duration. At certain levels, new abilities are unlocked. You can spend much-rarer Gems to make the upgrade happen instantly; the closer the upgrades are to complete, the fewer Gems you need to spend. Upgrading characters is vital as the levels get harder and harder, not to mention in the phone version you can only unlock new areas with an overall player level, which is raised by upgrading your characters. This isn't the case in the tablet version where you can spend Gold Coins to unlock new areas. You can have more than one character undergoing repairs.

Soon you get the option to have a second character on standby, who you can call in and have the computer control for a brief period. They enter the stage in slow motion with a massive shockwave that does heavy damage to most everything on-screen. However, there's a limit to when you are able to call in a partner; once you see Astrotrain fly overhead, your partner's no longer available. On the other hand, the stage is close to over! But if your partner is already out when you hit that checkpoint, then they will stay active until the very end of the level, nice for really piling on the destruction.

You get to see your partner before you start the stage, and if you don't like that character choice, you can change it by spending some Coins. Partners are either randomly generated, or pulled from the character rosters of your friends if you've connected to the game via Facebook or Google+ or iTunes or whatever the social network stuff the kids are into these days is. If you called on them in the level, you can "thank" them afterward. Doing so gives the other player a nominal reward (either a Gem or 25 Coins), while not thanking them simply tells the other player that while you're grateful for the firepower assist, you don't think they deserve any actual compensation. You jerk. However this seems to be only for your friends if you use the social network support. When you don't have friends or don't believe in social media, you get random users to help, and if people use your characters and you're not friends with them via social network you don't get any rewards if they thank you.

Ads and upsells

It's a free game, so how does Rovio make its money? By copious amounts of ads (largely for other games) and by enticing you to spend real currency on in-game currency.

The ads can actually have a gameplay effect, in a disturbingly clever move. After completing a stage, you are given the option to watch a short video ad; doing so doubles your end-of-stage rewards. When chosing a partner for a stage, you will also get a prompt to watch an ad; doing so gives your partner a one-stage stat boost and ups the amount of time they can stay in-play. However, you can only watch so many ads within a set amount of time, so choose which bonuses you go for wisely. And of course, sometimes ads will just pop up anyway.

Spending real monies allows you to buy large numbers of Gems, which are used to speed up character upgrades, repairs, and re-opening stages. Given that those can take from minutes or literal hours to over a day to finish, leaving you with no stages available to play til the required characters are back in commission, it gets tempting to drop some coin of the real variety.

Of course, you can get the same repair/upgrade speed-up effects with a Telepod-activated figure... which also costs real monies. And Rovio didn't explicitly mention that the game can be cloud saved on a Facebook account until much later, so depending on who you ask, this means that, according to many reviewers, if you had to do a wipe or ever lose your files for some reason, you can lose all your progress. People have gotten their characters leveled up to the max. Which costs hundreds of thousands of gold coins or thousands of gems (read: lots and lots of grinding or real monies) only for it to be all for nought. You can alter a device's time to make the upgrades go faster, although if you go too far or revert to current time, an error message saying something along the lines of "Error! Time travel detected! Your characters have suffered." and you'll be slapped on the wrist by getting them downgraded in relation to how far away from real time you were.

Autobirds Deceptihogs
  • Red as Optimus Prime
    • Regular
    • Energon
    • Ultimate
    • *Epic
  • Red as Ultra Magnus
  • Chuck as Bumblebee
    • Regular
    • High-Octane
  • Hal as Grimlock
    • Grey Slam
    • Energon
    • Goldbite
  • Terence as Heatwave
  • Terence as Sentinel Prime
  • Bubbles as Jazz
  • Stella as Arcee
  • Stella as Airachinid
  • The Blues as Bluestreak
  • The Blues as Prowl
  • Red as Nemesis Prime
  • *Terence as Ratchet
  • King Pig as Megatron
    • Dark
    • Ultimate
  • King Pig as Bludgeon
  • King Pig as Brawl
  • Corporal Pig as Galvatron
    • Regular
    • Energon
  • Chef Pig as Soundwave
    • Regular
    • Energon
  • Chef Pig as Soundblaster
  • Moustache Pig as Lockdown
    • Regular
    • Energon
  • Minion Pig as Starscream
    • Energon
  • Minion Pig as Thundercracker
  • *Minion Pig as Acid Storm
  • *Unknown Pig as Shockwave
Non-playable

*Characters that were only revealed as unreleased Telepod toys under the Turbo Energon subline.[1]

Energon characters take a bit more damage from attacks than their non-Energon counterparts (and non-Energon characters in general), but they are the only ones who can heal using Energon Cubes; receiving one adds back parts of a heart AND fills up the meter for the Energon weapon. The Ultimate characters (Ultimate Prime and Megatron, along with High Octane Bumblebee and Goldbite Grimlock) get an automatic 2x bonus to their coins at the end of the match, but if they are defeated the player doesn't get anything.

Notes

  • For reasons unknown, Energon Galvatron is the only playable character without a corresponding Telepods toy.
  • Although Airachnid uses Deceptihog materials to upgrade, the game makes her a member of the Autobirds; additionally, she gains Autobird upgrade materials in stages, and cheers Autobird partners while mocking Deceptihog ones.

References

This game is loaded with tiny jokes and references to Transformers lore.

  • The character designs pull from a broad mix of generations. While (obviously) Generation 1 gets the most representation, there are also elements from the live-action movies, Rescue Bots and War for Cybertron. (See individual character pages for the rundown on each.)
  • The initial loading screen has numerous nods to more specific (and occasionally obscure) bits of Transformers lore:
  • The music for the game was composed by Vince DiCola, who did the score for The Transformers: The Movie.
  • The building for friend activity resembles Fortress Maximus's city mode.
  • Each character has a number of wearable accessories, many of which are based on wider Transformers lore:




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